Engaging contemporary culture from a biblical worldview.
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60044. Intersectionality theory began life as a technical term in American legal scholarship and has since become a whole way of seeing the world. Kimberlé Crenshaw coined it in 1989 to describe a real problem: a black woman suing for discrimination could find that the courts recognised race claims and sex claims but had…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60041. Theological progressivism is not a denomination and does not have a headquarters, which is part of what makes it difficult to discuss. It is better understood as a method, a way of handling Scripture and doctrine which assumes that the church is on a journey away from its past and towards a fuller…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60040. Faith deconstruction has become the standard word for what happens when a believer starts pulling their inherited Christianity apart to see what, if anything, holds. It is worth noticing that the church has a much older word for a similar process, and that word is reformation. The two are not the same, and…
Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 60038. Religious trauma is a phrase that would have baffled my grandfather and is now common enough to have its own shelf in the bookshop. It describes the lasting harm some people carry from their experience of church, and the first thing I want to say is that the harm is often real. I…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60037. Moral relativism arrived with a promise of peace. If there is no truth binding on everyone, the argument went, then nobody can impose anything on anybody, and we shall all live together in easy tolerance. That was the sales pitch. Anybody who has watched a public disagreement in recent years knows that the…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60036. Expressive individualism is the water our culture swims in, and like all water it is hardest to notice when you are soaked in it. It is the conviction that each of us carries an authentic inner self, that the highest good is to discover and express that self, and that anything which restrains…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60035. The social gospel is a phrase thrown about in church arguments without anyone stopping to define it, and that is a pity, because the difference it names is real. I have sat in meetings where a good man was accused of preaching the social gospel because he wanted the church to open a…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 12061. Scripture does not endorse any of the economic systems human beings have devised, and I think that disappoints people on all sides. Christians keep hoping the Bible will bless capitalism or socialism outright, and it stubbornly refuses to do either. What it does give us is a set of convictions about property, work,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 12055. A Christian immigration ethic has to do something the newspapers never manage, which is to hold together a genuine concern for the stranger and a genuine concern for the community receiving him. Most public argument picks one and treats the other as evidence of bad faith. I am not going to tell you…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 12050. Ask a room of British evangelicals about climate change and you will get two confident answers and a lot of silence in between. One group treats it as the defining moral emergency of our time. Another treats the whole subject as a political trap dressed up in science. I think both are answering…